What is wrong with laypeople learning the words "phylogenetic" and "anthropoid"?
I am not a biologist, and my knowledge in the field is limited to what I learned in high school plus afterwards self study out of curiosity. I did know what "phylogenetic" refers to but I do not remember ever encountering the word "anthropoid". Yet I was perfectly able to infer what it means based on the meaning of the base and suffix.
If I don't know a word I look it up. Have people stopped doing this?
There is nothing wrong with laypeople learning words. But if you use words that laypeople don't know, it's not a good laymen definition. You seem to be under the impression that laymen terms means it's outside the capability or expected behavior of layman to understand ever.
Fair, but we were not discussing providing definitions using laymen terms. We were discussing using words in reformulations of titles of articles posted on HN. I expect people on HN to be able to deal with a title containing an unfamiliar word and seek either a precise or a laymens terms definition when needed.
> Provide an alternative title for "Updated imaging and phylogenetic comparative methods reassess relative temporal lobe size in anthropoids and modern humans" so that layman people would understand.
>If I don't know a word I look it up. Have people stopped doing this?
You should feel lucky that you are surrounded by curious people because it's not the norm for the world - though it's a great thing obviously. The process you describe is only done by an extreme minority of people.
Not-wrong in the sense that in practice most adults are not curious about 99% of topics out there.
Wrong in the sense that humans are naturally curious. I've seen it now with kids.
It seems to me that what happens through childhood is that not only are neural pathways pruned for efficiency, but curiosity is actively stifled and arguably totally destroyed in most kids, by adults. Coupled with adulthood time/money pressures, I'm not surprised that a large number of adults become completely intellectually inert, or worse, fully anti-intellectual.
I would argue that it should not be a minority of people for a community (HN) which values curiosity as claimed by the guidelines:
"the primary use of the site should be for curiosity"
"On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity. "
